Selling Out

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Recently, Jim posted, What Can We Learn From the Return of the Stadium Show? In it, he commented on an article by Ray Waddell in Billboard about the resurgence in concert tours taking place in stadiums this year. Jim's bottom line: Even though this is an interesting countertrend, be careful not to extrapolate too much from it. Stadiums are much too big for just about any act, and the days of selling out night after night after night are...

Tomorrow, Jim will be giving a fireside chat, titled "Bringing Real World Entertainment to Mobile," at the CTIA’s Super Mobility Week conference in Las Vegas. In preparation for his talk, last week he posted Why Do Mobile? Three Good Reasons, covering why, in general, anybody should invest in mobile technology to serve their customers.Super Mobility Week -- North America's largest forum for the leading authorities on the connected life -- is already underway.Follow Jim at @goldstarjim for his...

This Chicago Tribune article about street performers points out a few things -- about promotion, audience engagement, etc. -- that artists can learn from busking. One of the best quotes is: "It's easier to play for a crowd that came to hear you," guitarist Keithen Banks said. "But when you're playing in front of a crowd that didn't come to hear you and you win them over, you're doing something." Everyone's got to start somewhere (I remember seeing Michael Colyar on Venice...

Sometimes picking a venue for a production can make a loud statement. Or, a creepy one. Looks like the abandoned Lake Shawnee Amusement Park in West Virginia is opening again just in time for Halloween. The park was shut down in 1966 and is believed to be cursed. Read all about its haunted history and see more pictures at Roadtrippers.com.Apparently, it hasn't been that abandoned since it shut its gates: It was featured on Travel Channel’s Most Terrifying Places...

Freestyle Love Supreme can rap about anything. It's part of their performance: Audience members shout out words when asked for suggestions, and the fellas freestyle with only a keyboard and beatboxing backing them up. At this year's TEDxBroadway, of course they rapped about theater -- and a new show about ... well, watch the video below to find out what zany audience suggestion the group used for their freestyle.This five-man crew (two of them created the Tony-winning musical In...

Recently, we highlighted Backstage.com's list of seven theater companies doing immersive theater right, performing in abandoned schools, factories, hotels, even taxi cabs.This week, we have some refreshing news from the world of opera: The Huffington Post named 14 artists transforming the future of opera. From San Francisco-based "electrodiva" Pamela Z (No. 1) to Texas-based guerrilla performance artist and filmmaker Lisa E. Harris (No. 14), these avant-garde artists are adding excitement, and drawing new fans, to the genre.

People watching other people play video games on TV ... yes, that's happening, and it's called Twitch, an online network with, according to Yahoo, "55 million monthly users [who] viewed over 15 billion minutes of content on the service in July, making Twitch.tv one of the world's biggest sources of Internet traffic."Amazon just bought Twitch for $970 million. The Yahoo article points out that Twitch fans are "an important demographic for advertisers" -- mostly male and between the ages...

The government of Qatar and its developers are building an 86,000-seat soccer stadium to host the final game of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, according to a CNN Tech article. And that's not all. They're building an entire city, called Lusail, on a 28-square-mile strip along the Persian Gulf.If the World Cup actually lands in Qatar, despite activists pressuring FIFA to find another location, it'll be the first Arab country to host the World Cup. If not, well, Qatar...

Ritz-Carlton recently launched a campaign that has the bonus effect of drumming up free promotion: The company invited its social media friends and followers to provide six-word stories about their Ritz-Carlton experiences with the hashtag #RCMemories.The stories are called “Six Word Wows,” and the ad campaign honors Ernest Hemingway. The legend goes: Someone bet Hemingway he couldn’t write a story in six words, and he responded, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”Similar to the Mothers and Sons Daring Twitter...

When you buy a ticket to a show, you’re actually buying:a physical ticket (often) the anticipation of the event the entertainment of the event the memories and reflections that follow the event, including talking about it with other people a change in yourself — an upgradeThat's what Jim wrote back in October. Yesterday, Science of Us highlighted the findings of a new paper in Psychological Science, which suggest that we derive more pleasure from anticipating experiences than material objects. “The anticipatory period tends to be...